Abbey CBS Principal commends students in wake of cyber attack

THE resiliency shown on the part of students in the wake of the cyber attack upon C2K systems has been commended by Abbey CBS head Gina Savage.  

Mrs Savage praised the pupils of the school for their ability to adapt after they were prevented from remotely accessing their work from home over the Easter holidays.         

 As a result quite a number of pupils both at the Abbey and across the whole of the north were unable to put finishing touches upon material such as coursework as well as not being able to access revision material for upcoming exams.

However with a helping hand administered by the  Abbey  and the Education Authority as many as 200 pupils from year  11 up were able to come into the school to have their passwords reset. 

 Whilst Mrs Savage stated that she is not “unduly concerned”  that the cyber attack could have an adverse impact upon the academic performance of the pupils this year, she still commended the resiliency shown on the part of her pupils who lost “possibly four or five days of online access”  during the attack.

Faith in Pupils

“We have to have faith in our students.” explained Mrs Savage

“ It is not ideal that they lost possibly four or five days of online access but they do have textbooks and class notes for revision purposes.

“ For students who are doing vocational subjects with a strong coursework bias if they were on top of their workload they were tweaking they will still have the time when they go back. Will they have a wee bit of additional pressure over the next few weeks?

“Possibly yes but I am not unduly concerned at this stage provided when we go back in everything is up and running for them.

“We were told to do a password reset which we did. This worked until Friday but C2K put further measures in place. We opened on Tuesday morning from 9.30am until 1.30pm in order to let students who were in exam years to come in and update their passwords. There were over 200 students in the building that morning. These were generally boys who have coursework based subjects.

“The students are resilient and we will put measures in place, extending deadlines and so on As always these will be internal deadlines but they will still have to meet exam board deadlines. It will put more pressure on staff possibly in terms of the marking of work when we get back, I am mindful of this.”

Necessity not Luxury

As Mrs Savage explains the impact of the cyber attack upon C2K systems could not be more profound within the contemporary classroom environment , with the school principal explaining how access to ICT systems is now a necessity and not a luxury when it comes to administering an exceptional standard of education.    .

“The thing about education now is that access to ICT is not a luxury. It is a central part of how the students learn and revise as well as an essential part of learning and teaching nowadays.

“This is one of the Covid keepers, the reliance on how we communicate with our students through Microsoft teams and Google classroom.

“So when the system goes down the access to Microsoft goes down and access to Google goes down.

“When the C2K system goes down access to your word documents is also gone. So if students had drafted coursework which they were perfecting over the Easter holidays they had no access to this.

“The students who came in last Tuesday were in to get documents for work that was 80 to 90% finished which they were tweaking before they were being handed in to exam boards.

“It is too soon to say if we will be liasing with the exam board to try and get an extension to the coursework deadlines. It is a nationwide issue, the whole of the north has been impacted by this. Individual schools probably should not be in a position to do this.

“ It has been very well publicised that this is going on so I would imagine that the exam boards would be well aware of the situation facing pupils. It is still two or three weeks and as I say students are very resilient as they have proved time and again.”